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FRANCIS A. SCHAEFFER JOHN H. GERSTNER R.C. SPROUL JAMES I. PACKER JAMES MONTGOMERY BOICE GLEASON L. ARCHER KENNETH S. KANTZER Edited by James Montgomery Boice Pickering & Inglis llLONDON · GLASGOW Copyright© 1978 by The Zondervan Corporation Grand Rapids, Michigan Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Main entry under title: The Foundation of Biblical authority. I. Bible-Evidences, authority, etc. I. Schadler, Francis August. II. Boice,James Montgomery, 1938- BS480.F68 220.1'3 78-12801 Pickering & Inglis edition first published 1979 ISBN O 7208 0437 X Cat. No. 01/0620 This edition is issued by special arrangement with Zondervan Publishing House the American publishers. The chapter by Kenneth S. Kantzer, "Evangelicals and the Doctrine of Inerrancy," is adapted from Evangelical Roots, edited by Kenneth S. Kantzer (Nashville: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1978) and is used by permission. It has also appeared in an adapted form in Christianif, Today (April 21, 1978). All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means-electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other-except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Printed in Great Britain by Lowe & Brydone Printers Limited, Thetford, Norfolk, for PICKERING & INGLIS LTD., 26 Bothwell Street, Glasgow G2 6PA. ENCOUNTERING PRESENT-DAY VIEWS OF SCRIPTURE James I. Packer James I. Packer is Associate Principal ef Trinity College, Bristol, England. He was educated at Oxford University, where he took degrees in classics, philosophy, and theology and secured his doctorate in 1954for research on the Puritan Richard Baxter. Following two years' service on the staffof a church in Birmingham, he was Senior Tutor of Tyndale Hall, an Anglican Semi nary, 1955-61; Warden of Latimer House, a stu4J center in Oxford, 1961- 70; and Principal ef Tyndale Hall, 1970-71. Following the merger ef Tyndale Hall with two other colleges to become Trinity College in 1972, he assumed his present position. Dr. Packer is the author ef "Fundamen talism" and the Word of God, Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God, God Speaks to Man, Knowing God, and I Want to Be a Christian, as well as two chapters ("Sola Scriptura in History and Today" and "Cal11in's View of Scripture") in God's Inerrant Word, edited by]. W. Montgomery. 2 James I. Packer ENCOUNTERING PRESENT-DAY VIEWS OF SCRIPTURE THREE GENERAL observations will make clear the stand point from which I write. THEOLOGY AND RELIGION First, when you encounter a present-day view of Holj Scripture, you encounter more than a view of Scripture. What you meet is a total view of God and the world, that is, a total theology, which is both an ontology, declaring what there is, and an epistemology, stating how we know what there is. This is necessarily so, for a theology is a seamless robe, a circle within which everything links up with everything else through its common grounding in God. Every view of Scripture, in particular, proves on analysis to be bound up with an overall view of God and man. Nowadays, awareness of this fact seems to be fairly general, due to the intense and self conscious preoccupation with questions of method that has marked theology, along with most other fields of study, during the past half-century. We all now know (don't we?) that your method and presuppositions-in other words, the things you take for granted-will always have a decisive influence on your conclu sions. So there should certainly be no difficulty in getting agree ment on the point that you do not encounter any view of Holy Scripture, or of any other doctrinal matter, at proper depth till you see it as part of a larger intellectual whole and understand 61 62 THE FOUNDATION OF BIBLICAL AUTHORITY how it relates to and "works" within the unity of that larger unit. Indeed, to take the full measure of a view of Scripture, you must go wider than that and explore its implications for religion. For each set of theological convictions ( of which the view taken of Scripture will form an integral part) belongs to a total view of religion, that is, of right behavior and relationships toward God, as well as of right beliefs and reasonings in one's own mind. No theology can be properly evaluated except in the light of the religion to which it prescribes, explains, and justifies. Calvin saw this; hence he composed his theological textbook under the title lnstitutio Religionis Christianae ( Instruction in Chris tian Religion), writing into it a treatment of the basic realities of Christian living and making it breathe a spirit of devotion and doxology throughout. Puritans and seventeenth-century conti nental Reformed theologians saw the point too and hence defined theology in ways that highlighted its practical and religious thrust; thus, Perkins called it "the science of living blessedly for ever,"1 and Turretin described it as "theoretico-practica ... more practical than speculative."2 More recently, the Anglican Austin Farrer showed himself aware of the same point when he said somewhere that something must be wrong with Tillich's theology, because it could not be prayed. (Nor can it; Tillich himselflater in life made the sad admission that he had given up prayer for meditation.) The evaluative relevance of the practical implica tions of a position is surely too plain for anyone to deny. But for all that, the link between theology and religion is something that Protestant theologians today, as for the past hun dred years, repeatedly ignore. They talk and write as if they see theology as just an intellectual exercise of forming and analyzing notions; they treat the practical bearing of these notions as some one else's concern rather than theirs; they isolate topics artificially for speculative treatment, thus losing sight of the very nature of theology; and they fail to draw out the wide-range implications of each notion for Christian obedience. The trouble no doubt is that these theologians have been too busy keeping up with the philosophical Joneses in the secularized university circles where so much of their work is done and discussed and have been too little concerned to sustain their churchly identity and role. On this, Eric Mascall speaks the word in season: What I hold as essential for the theologian is that his theologizing should be an aspect of his life as a member of the Body of Christ; he ENCOUNTERING PRESENT-DAY VIEWS OF SCRIPTURE 63 needs to be under not only an academic but also a spiritual ascesis, as indeed all the Church's greatest theologians have been ... the theologian needs insight and he needs conversion, neither of which are simply the routine application of rules. 3 Agreed! But meanwhile we have to cope with the effects of a century of failure at this point, and the effects are that, on the one hand, theology has been made to look like an intellectual game divorced from life and, on the other hand, theological notions are not usually evaluated by the test tha.t is most decisive, namely, whether they further or impede the practice of biblical religion. Thus, for example, Clark Pinnock, in his helpful chapter in Bibli cal Authority, "Three Views of the Bible in Contemporary Theol ogy," observes the convention and lacks the element of practical and religious evaluation that his avowed concern for spiritual renewal might have been thought to require.4 In this essay I try to write pastorally and practically, as a would-be church theologian, rather than in the manner of a secularized academic. EVANGELICALISM AND SCRIPTURE Second, when you encounter the evangelical view ef Holy Scripture,you are encountering the source, criterion, and control ef all evangelical theology and religion. Chillingworth's open-textured dictum that the Bible alone is the religion of Protestants can mean several things, not all of them acceptable, but it fits evangelicalism most precisely. Methodologically, evangelical theology stands apart from other positions by its insistence on the clarity and sufficiency of the canonical Scriptures, and evangelical religion is distinctive by reason of the theology and the method of application that deter mines it. Let me spell this out. Roman Catholicism, Anglo-Catholicism, and Orthodoxy characteristically say that though the God-given Scriptures are a sufficient guide for faith and practice in themselves, they are at key points unclear and can rightly be understood only by the light of the church's God-taught tradition. By contrast, Protes tantism's many blends of rationalism, mysticism, and existen tialism ( unstable compounds, all of them) characteristically say that while it is fairly clear what beliefs and behavior patterns the Bible writers want their readers to adopt, the books vary so much from each other, and Scripture as a whole stands at such a distance from the modern world, that the Bible cannot be a sufficient guide for today till what it says is sieved, edited, and 64 THE FOUNDATION OF BIBLICAL AUTHORITY recast in the light of all that our age takes for granted. Let it be said that both positions invoke the Holy Spirit, the former as author of both Scripture and tradition, the latter as illuminating mind and conscience to enable each individual to formulate his personal understanding of Christianity. Let it also be said that both types of position are held with learning and integrity and admit of a great deal of internal debate and adjustment ( a factor that tends to prolong the life of scholarly options), and there is no sign of their imminent decease. Not, of course, that their vitality implies that either is wholly right.